Gnome's Dialogues

[Matthew East]

On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 23:01 +1000, James "Doc" Livingston wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 13:47 +0100, Matthew East wrote:
> > Gnome markets itself as an incredibly usable desktop, and I personally
> > find it very productive and efficient to work on. However one thing
> > which a friend of mine pointed out really startles me. Some dialogues
> > have two buttons, one for cancelling and one for saving[1] (let's call
> > that dialogue 1). The cancel button in these dialogues is often a cross,
> > which sounds pretty logical. 
> > 
> > Yet, other dialogues have one button, marked "Close"[2] (dialogue 2).
> > These appear to do the same thing as the saving button in the first type
> > of dialogue. Here's the crazy thing: the save button in dialogue 2 is
> > marked with a cross! What's going on here? It's too much for me to
> > understand.
> 
> The "Close" button in dialogue 2 isn't really the same as the "Save"
> button in dialogue 1.
> 
> The first dialogue is "explicit apply", which means that you need to do
> something to apply the changes (pressing Save in this case). The second
> dialogue is "instant apply", which means that your changes are saved
> immediately, and the button just closes the window (like the one in the
> window frame).

I really feel that the usability of the dialogues would be improved by
having one type of dialogue rather than two. I can see the distinction
you're making, but I can't see any obvious reason for it, and I
certainly think most users will be confused. I've often clicked the
cross in the top right corner of the dialogue instead of "Close", in the
hope that my changes won't be retained.

Matt
-- 
mdke at ubuntu.com
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
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